Ariana Grande Asked Fans to Stop Commenting on Her Body in 2023: The Same Words Are Back Under New Photos

Ariana Grande asked followers in April 2023 to be gentler about other people's bodies. That request went unheard under Instagram pictures her boyfriend, Ricky Alvarez, shared last week. One X user wrote 'please get her help' on 17 September. Beneath the pictures, a second commenter accused her of starving herself in public.

Grande, 33, has since stepped back from public life. Her team announced the break on 2 August, and her Eternal Sunshine Tour ended in London on 1 September. Two eating disorder experts say the remarks rarely reach Grande herself. Those words land on readers who share Grande's shape.

Grande's Video Message and the Replies

Grande spoke to camera for about three minutes in April 2023 and listed the labels she wanted dropped: healthy, unhealthy, big, small, and sexy. The look viewers kept calling healthy had been Grande's lowest point. She was on antidepressants then, she said, drinking on top of them, and eating badly. She asked viewers to be 'gentler and less comfortable commenting on people's bodies, no matter what.' Her full TikTok video sits below.

Alvarez shared his pictures of Grande last week, and they show her smiling in a red-and-white dress with her hair pulled back. Beneath them, the replies ran through Grande's list. One commenter called Grande extremely thin and another said she dressed like a toddler. A third wrote that Grande deserved to be her healthiest self. She had rejected that exact label. IBTimes UK reported a separate alarm on 21 September over a razor image in the set.

Two Experts on Who Hears the Remarks

'We don't know if she's healthy,' Lucie Vallée, a body image therapist in France, told Yahoo Canada. The problem, in Vallée's view, is not noticing a shift towards thinness but pinning that shift on one woman. A comment on a person's body tells everyone who reads it that someone is watching how that body moves and changes. That harm reaches everyone who reads the comment, not only the woman it names.

Ary Maharaj, who leads education work at Canada's National Eating Disorder Information Centre (NEDIC), made the same point. 'The celebrities themselves are never going to hear those comments, probably,' Maharaj told Yahoo Canada. Those who do hear them are friends and relatives in similar bodies, who then wonder whether the writer of the comment would judge them too, for their food or their bodies. NEDIC's media guidance says eating disorders have no single look.

Grande's Later Replies and What Comes Next

Grande has argued the same point in earlier years. In a 2024 Wicked interview, she said she had felt like a specimen in a Petri dish since her teens. She called the habit of judging looks dangerous for everyone. In November 2015, she answered a user who compared her body with actress Ariel Winter's.

Grande has not replied to the comments, and her break from public work continues. On 3 August, she told a Chicago crowd she had planned the step, and it was not sudden. Maharaj offers one test before anyone comments on a stranger's body: ask whom the comment serves.